This invention relates in general to special tools for handling confined parts and in particular to a new and useful pressing tool for securing screw connections between steering linkages of motor vehicles.
The invention relates particularly to a pressing tool to secure screw connections on motor vehicle steering linkages, in particular the screw connection between a ball joint socket having a cylindrical, tubular extension and the threaded pin of a pitman arm. The pitman arm is provided with two diametrically opposed, mutually plane-parallel, wrench flats which partly project into the tubular extension of the ball joint socket and against which part sections of the tubular extension of the ball joint socket can be applied in form-closing fashion by radial press deformation.
There are motor vehicles, in particular passenger cars, where such steering linkages are so closely enveloped by other body or engine parts that the wrench flats of the screw connections, i.e. of the ball joint socket and pitman arm, are not accessible for conventional tools. Consequently, it is not possible, with conventional squeezing tools to press the cylindrical, tubular extension of a ball joint socket which has been replaced in the course of repair work, against the wrench flats of the pitman arm so as to secure the screw connection against disconnecting by itself.
Since some screw connections are accessible in some motor vehicles only from the free end of the steering rod pivoted in the ball joint socket, it is the object and the task of the invention to create a pressing tool which can be pushed over the ball joint socket from the free end of the steering rod, can also be actuated from the free end of the steering rod, and which makes it possible to press sections of the cylindrical, tubular extension of the ball joint socket against the wrench flats of the pitman arm of the respective steering linkage, by simple manipulation and application of the pressing tool.